Galeria Alessandra Bonomo is pleased to announce its new exhibition “TESTE”

JUNE 4- SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

head (hɛd)
npl head
1. (Anatomy) the upper or front part of the body in vertebrates, including man, that contains and protects the brain, eyes, mouth, and nose and ears when present.
2. (Anatomy) the corresponding part of an invertebrate animal
3. something resembling a head in form or function, such as the top of a tool
4. (Sociology)
a. the person commanding most authority within a group, organization, etc
b. (as modifier): head buyer.
c. (in combination): headmaster.
5. the position of leadership or command: at the head of his class.
6.
a. the most forward part of a thing; a part that juts out; front: the head of a queue.
b. (as modifier): head point.
7. the highest part of a thing; upper end: the head of the pass.
8. (Brewing) the froth on the top of a glass of beer
9. aptitude, intelligence, and emotions (esp in the phrases above or over one's head, have a head for, keep one's head, lose one's head, etc): she has a good head for figures; a wise old head.
10. a person or animal considered as a unit: the show was two pounds per head; six hundred head of cattle.
11. the head considered as a measure of length or height: he's a head taller than his mother.
12. (Botany) botany
a. a dense inflorescence such as that of the daisy and other composite plants
b. any other compact terminal part of a plant, such as the leaves of a cabbage or lettuce
13. a culmination or crisis (esp in the phrase bring or come to a head)
14. (Pathology) the pus-filled tip or central part of a pimple, boil, etc
15. the head considered as the part of the body on which hair grows densely: a fine head of hair.
16. (Physical Geography) the source or origin of a river or stream
17. (Physical Geography) (capital when part of name) a headland or promontory, esp a high one
18. (Currencies) the obverse of a coin, usually bearing a portrait of the head or a full figure of a monarch, deity, etc. Compare tail1
19. a main point or division of an argument, discourse, etc
20. (Journalism & Publishing) (often plural) the headline at the top of a newspaper article or the heading of a section within an article
21. (Nautical Terms) nautical
a. the front part of a ship or boat
b. (in sailing ships) the upper corner or edge of a sail
c. the top of any spar or derrick
d. any vertical timber cut to shape
e. (often plural) a slang word for lavatory
22. (Grammar) grammar another word for governor7
23. (Instruments) the taut membrane of a drum, tambourine, etc
24. (General Physics)
a. the height of the surface of liquid above a specific point, esp when considered or used as a measure of the pressure at that point: a head of four feet.
b. pressure of water, caused by height or velocity, measured in terms of a vertical column of water
c. any pressure: a head of steam in the boiler.
25. (Pharmacology)
a. a person who regularly takes drugs, esp LSD or cannabis
b. (in combination): an acidhead; a pothead.
26. (Mining & Quarrying) mining a road driven into the coal face
27.
a. the terminal point of a route
b. (in combination): railhead.
28. (General Engineering) a device on a turning or boring machine, such as a lathe, that is equipped with one or more cutting tools held to the work by this device
29. (Automotive Engineering) See cylinder head
30. (Electronics) an electromagnet that can read, write, or erase information on a magnetic medium such as a magnetic tape, disk, or drum, used in computers, tape recorders, etc
31. (Education) short for headmaster, headmistress
32. (Horse Racing)
a. the head of a horse considered as a narrow margin in the outcome of a race (in the phrase win by a head)
b. any narrow margin of victory (in the phrase (win) by a head)
33. (Pathology) short for headache
34. (Curling) curling the stones lying in the house after all 16 have been played
35. (Bowls & Bowling) bowls the jack and the bowls that have been played considered together as a target area
36. (Rugby) against the head rugby from the opposing side's put-in to the scrum
[Old English hēafod; related to Old Norse haufuth, Old Frisian hāved, Old Saxon hōbid, Old High German houbit]

Ben Bloomstein was born in 1988 in NYC.LIves and works in NYC
Matt Kenny was born in 1979 in Kansas City, Missouri. Lives and works in NYC
Tristano di Robilant was born in 1964 in London. Lives and work in Ripabianca,Umbria.
Rand Hardy was born in 1944 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsilvania. Lives and works in NYC

From 30 April to 13 September 2015 (opening the Wednesday 29 April 2015 6:30 pm) the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici presents the exhibition Jean-Luc Moulène. Il était une fois, dedicated to one of the major figures on the international contemporary artistic scene. The works of Jean-Luc Moulène – objects, photographs, films – express both a permanent reflection on the condition of the artist in society, a radical criticism of the manipulations and seduction of representation as well as a formal research often tinged with humor and derision.

Curated by Éric de Chassey, this exhibition focuses on recent works, created by the artist for this occasion, as well as earlier projects that offer an overview of his work. Jean-Luc Moulène. Il était une fois represents the third and last step of an itinerary that began with the Disjonctions exhibition, organized at the Center of Contemporary Art Transpalette in Bourges, curated by Damien Sausset in the summer of 2014, and continued with Documents & Opus (1985-2014) at the Kunstverein Hannover, under the direction of Kathleen Rahn. Each exhibition is dedicated to different aspects of Moulène’s production, ranging from photography to sculpture, from drawing to painting, not forgetting his posters, brochures and other publications.

Jean-Luc Moulène. Il était une fois was prepared by repeated visits at Villa Medici that allowed the artist to immerge himself in the spirit of this setting and react to it. The idea of this monographic exhibition was conceived in 2010, and since then he has often resided at Villa Medici, a place that he already knew well, having participated in two collective exhibitions there: La Mémoire in 1999 and La Fabrique de l'image in 2004.

This exhibition presents an apparently heterogeneous selection of over thirty works that will enable the public to grasp some of the artist’s distinctive characteristics: his use of the objet trouvé or the “given situation” as seized through a photographic principle (what Moulène calls “documents”) or processed and elaborated according to the principles of drawing (which he calls “opus”); an approach to reality that does not reduce art to mere communication or narrative, but rather proposes a presentation of images; a way of conceiving his own works both as a thought experience as well as an experience of emotions, beyond their apparent formal diversity.

The exhibition opens with one of the oldest images of the artist, Bubu 1er (1977), a primitivist drawing, here correlated to a large two-faced object realized with moulding and assembly, Janus (2014), and a photograph, Manuel Joseph, portraying the poet with whom the artist had collaborated for the exhibition at Villa Medici in 2004. These works make the presence of the body an explicit aspect of Moulène’s work, while the rest of the exhibition treats this theme more implicitly. The theme of a body producing objects or the body blending in with objects is also present in the series Tronches (2014), consisting of fifteen objects modeled in cement from carnival masks and placed on colorful covers, or the Tricolore (2015), made with blown glass objects compressed by a steel structure.

Numerous works on display revisit history – that of the artist or of the venue – and this is one of the meanings suggested by the title, Il était une fois “Once upon a Time”. Some works evoke architectural or decorative elements in Villa Medici, such as the monochrome patinas that Moulène has chosen for two exhibition rooms and that recall – without being a faithful copy – the way Balthus applied color in the 1960s, when he was director of the French Academy in Rome. Or again, the film Les Trois Grâces, shown in the Salon de musique, which recalls one of the main bas-reliefs of the Villa’s façade.

Jean-Luc Moulène
Born in Reims in 1955, Jean-Luc Moulène lives and works in Paris. He began his professional itinerary as a photographer, achieving recognition with the series Objets de grève (1999-2000) and 48 Palestinian Products (2002-2005); from the end of the 1990s he has also devoted himself to the production of objects and drawings. He participated in Documenta X (1997), the Saõ Paulo Biennial (2002), the Venice Biennale (2003), the Taipei Biennial (2004), the Sharjah Biennial (2010). Among the cultural institutions which have dedicated exhibitions to his work are: the Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva (2003), the Contemporary Art Center in Kitakyushu (2004), the Louvre Museum in Paris (2005), the Culturgest in Lisbon (2007), the Carré d’art - Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes (2009), Dia:Beacon in New York (2011) and Modern Art Oxford (2012). In 2011 he created two huge objects, Body and Body Versus Twizy, produced by Renault. His works are part of the most important public and private art collections, such as the Centre Pompidou or Dia:Beacon. He is currently participating in the Slip of the Tongue collective exhibition in Punta della Dogana, Venice, curated by Danh Vo.
Jean-Luc Moulène is represented by the Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), Galerie Pietro Sparta (Chagny), Thomas Dane Gallery (London) Galerie Greta Meert (Brussels), Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York), Galeria Désiré Saint Phalle (Mexico).

The Gallery Apart is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Italy by Rowena Harris, who was awarded the opportunity to live and work in Rome as The Sainsbury Scholar in sculpture at The British School at Rome. After almost a year on the artist residency programme, “Being both on and within, as I said” accumulates and presents an accurate assessment of an experience defined as seminal by the artist herself, who has been further developing her research on the relationship between sculpture, object and human body in a historical, architectural and social surrounding that provide a richness in new original ideas and inspirations for the London-based artist.

Rowena Harris is committed to a deeper understanding of contemporary reality, where the mind, the body, the self and things are integrally linked, and where the imaginative perception is both mental and physical. Harris employs this perceptive dimension within her work as an approach that involves the imagination of the viewer, alongside a bodily trace. The works included and the relationship between them, express a view of the contemporary world which can be understood as informed by the digital era, yet not limited to digital space. There is no distinction between virtual and reality in the way that our self and experiences are constructed and lived.

Ordinary objects which are treated as fossils or artefacts, or contemporary elements seen through an archeological view finder, evoke an earlier and different human presence. These are placed in relationship to sculptures that frame the real presence of the visitors who interact with the sculptural work just by their approach - consequently this framing places an image of their own body which is then offered to the view of other visitors. Hence, Harris’s sculptural work invites the audience to activate the work: a “being on and within” the sculptural work through a subtle and gentle performative act. Sculpture-frames and sculpture-objects frame or evoke body parts, referring not only to the relationship between virtual and reality, but also to a hybrid territory where they meet, and where these two terms breakdown. Such as the ubiquitous screen-based devices that represent an extension of the human body or when we place a part of our body on these devices, for example when, with our fingers, we involuntarily cover a photographic lens.

The exhibition is spread across the two floors of the gallery and each floor gives a different modality to the interaction between bodies and sculptures. On the ground floor, the works are alternating and prospectively touching in a constant process of framing and unframing. Sculpture-frames standing in the gallery’s space or hanging from the ceiling contain the image of other sculptures and visitors. The human presence or forms pertaining to a close relationship to the skin are evoked by fragments of shirts or by small objects trapped in the concrete. Silicon rubber micro-sculptures replicating dozens of ordinary objects we carry everyday in our pockets and which here are gathered together to form a strip along the wall as if dropped as cultural detritus. Complementing this are sculptures created through three-dimensional prints of actual human organs, gathered via MRI scans that provide parts of the body we can not see but can digitally reproduced. Finally fabric drapes where cyanotype, the most basic sun-reactive photographic solution, captures the a chance contemporary moment through a human scale process (a length of fabric enough to crumple in the hand and later to hang at human scale).

The sculptural work in the basement of the gallery is a place offering a different time interaction, inviting and accommodating human engagement and giving a place to rest the body. The work welcomes the visitors, encourages them to sit and to interact with a book created by the artist and which represents an integral part of the work of art. The book includes a collection of recent writing that Harris has developed in symbiosis with the sculptural work and on occasion of other previous performances. To the artist, in fact, written language is closely linked with that of sculptural language, where personal perception, imagination, memory and bodily understanding are called upon for a better comprehension of the work.

Hilla Ben Ari returns to Rome to present her latest work Na’amah: A Tribute to Nachum Benari, a video work created for the Ein Harod Art Museum (Israel). Nachum Benari, writer and intellectual born in the Ukraine in 1893, was the artist’s great uncle and one of the founders of both the Ein Harod Museum and the nearby kibbutz. During his lifetime Nachum Benari published many academic essays and theatrical works, including Tubal-Cain (1951), a biblical-themed text which examines issues such as arrogance, guilt and punishment within a collective setting. This theatrical work proved inspirational for Hilla Ben Ari’s latest video work. She focuses on the marginal character Na’amah— silent sister of Tubal-Cain and daugther of Lamec who toiled as a gleaner—in an attempt to retell the biblical tale through problems related to gender issues. Na’amah represents a sacrificial victim of more powerful forces; the feminine figure constrained to silence and emarginated by the men of her own family who are able only in this way to impose their own presence. As usual in her work, Hilla Ben Ari communicates through body language to narrate about human relations and mental states; she puts these to the test through physical force, constraining them into uncomfortable positions for various minutes. Bodies are blocked in plastic forms, vibrating sculptures pulsating with tension and on the point of exploding. In the video, groups of persons are seen to be in opposition with individuals, expressing the dynamics of a group context; the actions are contained within the harsh, spartan scaffolding which delimits the forestage. Void of narrative, the video is essential and lyrical, with a sequence of images highlighting the physical states of strength, weakness and collapse.
The same tension of precarious equilibrium is embodied in Alice Cattaneo’s sculptures, exhibited for the first time at Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch. The Milan-born artist works on forms and materials, plastic, flexible or changeable; sometimes functional to her own mental imagery, other times the materials take precedence in creating artistic dialogue. As the artist explains, “It is an experience rather similar to what one feels in front of a landscape when you have the sensation of not really being able to see it; you feel blocked in front of the sight before your eyes. Her work is rooted in experiences of this kind, the impossibility of being able to see creates a sort of suspension in space and time which exists before the real perception of the world. Something akin to an area of transition”. () Thus, precarious structures are formed; they are assembled according to a pure plastic sensitivity, bringing together metallic grids, wooden sticks and sheets of plexiglass in a Constructivist gnarl. The understanding between materials is a form of poetics, created from the physical and private relationship between themselves and the surroundings where her installation are located. An almost sacred intimacy takes over the space which is charged with an unexpressed expectancy born from the transitory nature of the works, which seem on the point of transforming into something else.

The appropriation of everyday urban leftovers has always characterised the content of May Hands’ work. With these materials, she critically reflects upon her surrounding environment as an outsider, albeit from a similar European culture. In 'Freschissimi', this critical stance takes the form of a personal consideration of the visual signs of contemporary materialism and urban scenarios, and her recontextualisation engages this reflection in an expanding range of outcomes for the exhibition.

The series of works presented in the main room of the gallery incorporates the superfluous elements recurring in our daily urban transits and rituals of consumption. Something as humble and contingent as food wrapping records the accidental and incidental marks and gestures, coming from both the raw use by the consumer and the actions and habitat of Hands’ studio process. These works further unfold this aspect of contingency and temporality, through the accompanying installation: its structure, colours and form mirroring and redefining the paintings opposite.

The interrogation on the life and destiny of objects, and on how to chisel beauty out of the discarded, takes an even more radical drift in the last room of the gallery. A new series of sculptures has been created from the casts of buckets filled with similar urban leftovers inhabiting the canvases. Made using the same approach as though a painting, yet taking on a sculptural form, these works introduce the element of chance as the purposely loose attitude to fully control the process of molding with plaster, and the behaviour of additional materials, is exposed in the layers of the sculptures.

In all areas of her practice, May Hands subtly exposes the various characteristics of materiality of things, and explores new forms and appearances. This range of possibilities implies an aesthetics that celebrates fragility, sensuous colour and modified surfaces. These elements are given new life and constitute an anthropological discourse on the nature of contemporary society as environmental awareness challenges the capitalist project.

The Musee de art modern et contemporaine de Saint-Etienne Metropole is glad to host for the first time outside of Italy and in a public museum, the Fondazione VOLUME !, from June 13 to 20 January 2016.
The Foundation will present the exhibition Passages dedicated to the activity that takes place since 1997 in its historical space in Rome.
The exhibition will open on June 12 at 18:30.
Born from the collaboration of Francesco Nucci, founder and president of the foundation, with some of the most brilliant minds and influential italian artists, VOLUME! started is journey devoting itself to the free reinterpretation of its rooms through the work of the artists. In the Nineties in Rome, VOLUME! found its peculiar position, brightening up the cultural life of the city, as a place in which the artist is free to create his artwork guided by a complex system of relations that spring among space, work and experience.
Passages is like a journey into the history of VOLUME!, that takes shape in the wide rooms of the Museum, as a village made up of several small “housing units”. The meaning of this element is not just architectonic but it can be found in the story of the exhibition space and as a permanent feature that has often tied the theme of the work to the space.
Each space contains a trace of the work that the artist realized in via San Francesco di Sales, maintaining its uniqueness and its transient state, and, at the same time, leads to the surface the memories layered on the walls of VOLUME!. In this unusual occasion, each work comes into a close relationship with the other, not only in a spatial system, but placing themselves on the same temporal level. This makes even more evident the primary purpose of the Foundation: that of being a place of total freedom, where the artist has the possibility of working autonomously, of modifying the space unconditionally, of giving a form to his idea, and offer it to the public. The exhibition path, designed by Anomia Studio, will be accompanied and highlighted by some works set on the walls of the exhibition space, contributing to the total transformation of the museum.
Since the floor destroyed during the first intervention of Alfredo Pirri, to the chaotic invasion of color Thomas Lange, the spirit of the Foundation has never changed, confirmed by the exhibitions that have taken place over the years. Emblematic are the iconic pregnant woman protagonist of the work of Kounellis, the rooms painted by Gianni Dessi, the alchemical works of Gilberto Zorio, the sculptural signs by Nunzio and Bizhan Bassiri and Francois Morellet’ neons. And yet the experiences of Pizzi Cannella, Mimmo Paladino, Gregorio Botta, Arcangelo, Giuseppe Gallo, HH Lim, Bruno Ceccobelli, Marco Gastini, Michele Zaza, Elvio Chiricozzi, Giuseppe Maraniello, Balka and Pirri, or the destruction wrought by Pedro Cabrita Reis, the work on time and the memory of Christian Boltanski and Fabio Mauri, the car burned by Costa Vece, the reflection on censorship of Carlos Garaicoa and Gianfranco Baruchello, the domestic space of Flavio Favelli, the Temple of Jimmie Durham, and also the idea of the space as a living body of Jaume Plensa and Sissi. Freedom is also underlined by the great difference between the works, from the straw into the wall by Olaf Nicolai, to the tunnel of Rui Chafes, from the small columns of Michele De Lucchi, to the towers of Valery Koshlyakov, and to the performative experiences of Santiago Sierra and Regina Jose Galindo.
The exhibition, in addition to re-create the work of the artists, presents records and documents of the “passage” of the artists, gathered in over 17 years, through the photographs of Claudio Abate, Rodolfo Fiorenza and Claudio Martinez and video documentaries of Giada Colagrande, Valerio Pittiglio, Dafnis & Papadatos.
On the occasion of the exhibition, will be published a book about the life of VOLUME! since 1997, with texts by Achille Bonito Oliva, Danilo Eccher, Lorand Hegyi, Lorenzo Benedetti, Silvano Manganaro, Silvia Marsano and a dialogue between Francesco Nucci and Claudia Gioia.

With Lara Favaretto’s Good Luck, MAXXI is continuing with its mission to promote the excellence of Italian artistic creativity.
Ten years have gone by since, through the Young Italian Art Prize, the first work by Lara Favaretto entered the Museum’s permanent collection, and now MAXXI is devoting an entire gallery to her latest creations, at a time when her work has become internationally acknowledged as some of the most significant of her generation.

Good Luck presents eighteen of the twenty cenotaphs created by Lara Favaretto since 2010, bringing them together for the first time.
A cenotaph is an empty tomB a funerary monument of highly symbolic value. They have been erected since antiquity to preserve the memory of the deceased, without containing their mortal remains, which may be lost or in some other place. Each one of Favaretto’s cenotaphs is dedicated to a person who has disappeared.

Erected in their memory, the cenotaphs we see in Good Luck are in the form of sculptural volumes of different shapes and sizes, consisting of a combination of surfaces in wood, brass and earth.
Hidden within these volumes, or placed next to them, buried or in contact with the earth, there are metal boxes that contain a number of objects that belonged, or are dedicated, to the disappeared.

Brought together in Rome for the Good Luck exhibition, the cenotaphs are made to be dispersed and preserved separately. Their final locations will draw a new, ideal, utopian map of places destined to the memory of the deceased.

MOUNTAINTOP WATERDROP alludes to the artist’s practice, specifically focusing on its physical and emotional aspects. Gianni Politi’s works - metaphorically inspired by the story of the cycle of the water drop, narrated to Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Casey Affleck’s movie I’m still here – reflects upon the theme of the re-birth from the bottom: as the drops after touching the floor evaporate towards the sky, the fragments of Politi’s destroyed canvases gain value when from the floor they reach the walls.

The artist positions himself in the flow of a new History of Painting that starts with the overcoming of failure, “I kept on looking at the debris accumulated on the floor on my studio, which were the result of a failed yet never interrupted practice. At a certain point I started to elaborate the technique that led to the formal constitution of this series of works: works that deal with experiences and recoveries, packed with important information”, says Politi.

In MOUNTAINTOP WATERDROP large canvases composed of the fragments of destroyed works, exiled for more than a year in the artist’s studio, are reconfigured and brought back to life. Abstract forms become references to a modern Art History wholly Italian, studied, appreciated, interpreted and re-established by Gianni Politi. The spectator consequently finds himself in a tangible present where the past seems poetically evoked.

MOUNTAINTOP WATERDROP will also have a narrative form. The exhibition will be recounted by the voices of two masters of Italian painting, Enzo Cucchi (Morro d’Alba, Ancona, 1949) and Giuseppe Gallo (Rogliano, Cosenza, 1954).
The two artists will illustrate the displayed works connecting them to their experience as painters, to an Italian Art History and to their relationship with Gianni Politi. The two recorded tours will give the visitor the possibility to choose the narrator by whom to be led.